Fairway
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Overview
What is Fairway?
Fairway is a business process management system that allows the tracking and management of work items through user-defined steps in a process.
Business need
Businesses handling high volumes of information require reliable and efficient management of the information as it flows through various steps in their business processes.
With different people involved in handling a single item, it is important that the correct items get to the right people along every step in a process. Items often need to be processed in accordance with service level agreements, which implies that items need to be processed based on a set of pre-defined priorities. Managers need to be able to intervene by assigning specific items to specific users and to raise the importance of certain items.
Business processes must be able to change quickly without affecting existing work. Making these changes should therefore be easy to do with the minimum of interruption to processes in production. Manual and automated steps must mingle seamlessly in a single business process. Bottlenecks need to constantly be monitored and managed to streamline the business processes.
How we solve it
Fairway provides a business process management system comprising of a web based front-end, a process management application running as a Windows service and a process designer.
The Fairway Designer is an easy to use drag-and-drop environment that allows users to easily create and change processes. These new process versions can be uploaded into the system at any time. Existing process items keep running on the process versions they were created on, while all new items are created on the latest process version. The impact of changing processes is minimised by the fact that each step in a process can be configured individually. This means that the user needs to only be exposed to the information and actions relevant to the specific step in the process at any given time.
Fairway’s priority rules editor supports the creation and maintenance of rule sets that can be defined based on processes, states, date created, etc. to ensure that the next most important item is always the one to get processed. Various different rule sets can be configured and applied by managers should the need arise to change the priorities. Managers can also mark items for immediate attention, thus ensuring specific items receive precedence. By using a ‘get next’ mechanism, users will always pick up the next most important item based on the active priority rules set.
Fairway contains ‘unavailable user’ functionality to ensure items do not get stuck with specific users while they are off sick or on leave. If a manager marks a user as unavailable, not only will all items assigned to that user be released back into the system, but all assignments to the specific user will not occur, leaving these items available for processing.
Fairway keeps a complete audit trail of processes and their state transitions. It provides useful data for determining bottlenecks and tracking the behaviour of the people and the systems involved.
Business benefit
Business processes are enforced resulting in consistent results and metrics to help improve the processes.
Manual and automated steps are seamlessly joined in a single process resulting in logical and efficient processing.
Priority rules objectively allocate work while manual overrides can cater for exceptional cases. This means that the most important work gets done first.
Processes can be changed quickly without affecting production allowing the business to respond rapidly to evolving requirements.
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